I have the pleasure of being a part of a diverse PB development group (OSBBx/BNXtreme/BBXteam) of about 20 or so. A bunch of us small developers got together to work on things like emulators, open sourfe apps, tools, etc.

One of our challenges has been around IRC and chat. There are several IRC options but RIM has made notifications difficult on the pb inAIR. And IRC is battery intensive. I imagine when cascades is out and ndk is more GUI friendly this will change.

I hqve used Firc and Chatosphere. They "do the job" but you wont find an MIRC client unfortunately. We have added it to our todo list but it doesnt have priority currently.

I am currently looking into an HTML5 / PHP multi-platform notification enables group chat alternative (PB doesnt support BBM groups and some users have no BB's). The only reliable way wih solid notifications will be to push it throug android side. But this still isnt IRC.